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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] art-science discussion

hi Annick!

about languages:

> Is language a cultural heritage ? Should we preserve them ? How ?>

In the era of data and computation, language becomes even more a part ofcultural heritage, in my opinion.Language today gets dissected, analysed, generated etc through digitaltools, natural language processing techniques, AI, machine learning.And these are not neutral processes.First of all for their own structure, origins, agendas etc. A naturallanguage analysis process using machine learning designed for English doesnot necessarily work for Italian, or French. Or, if it works, it will makecertain assumptions, based on the starting vocabularies, and languagestructures, histories, cultures etc which will have certain expressionsuntranslatable, misinterpreted etc.This also causes loops. For example: if AI interprets language wrong, andit uses the interpretation to control processes which have impacts on theworld, this creates a loop, because if I say "A", the AI interprets "B" andfeeds "B" to me, and if this is systematic (for example think about it interms of things happening in social networks or search engines, where thesethings can cause systematic communication and information with/to millionsof people, multiple times a day), "B" will progressively become"something", even if it was not before.This is linguistic evolution, but the fact that it can be so directly (andopaquely) influenced by so many different agendas may be something tothoroughly research.

What can we do?

first of all support and open source.

support: these research activities are largely unfinanced. Developers andresearchers use software tools lightly, most of the times, using softwaremade for English to parse Italian, French etc. And even if they usedictionaries in these languages, the software itself is not neutral (andthe people who created it, in English etc). Code is law, once said Lessig:it applies also here.

And then open source: there are multiple semantic databases etc, whichcould be open sourced and preserved, studied, observed for how theydescribe language as it evolves.Instead most of the times they are used to drive Dictionary and Thesauruswebsites, to obtain ad-driven revenue, or only accessible to corporations,to infer data from text content, so they can build up rich user profiles.It is a pity, and strategies should be put in place to make them available,accessible and usable.A museum of language, in this sense, would be a wonderful thing to do.

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